Re: [Jfs-discussion] System hangs: JFS on IDE drives

[Barry A. <ba...@us...>]

Jacob Herbold wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've looked around and can't seem to find a solution to this problem.
>
> I'm upgrading an existing system with additional storage capacity and
will be reinstalling linux, however I was checking things out > first and
ran into this problem.
>
> First off I'm not sure this is a JFS problem at all, but I haven't had
probelms with these disks until I tried JFS on them. I hope
> someone might suggest how I can shine some light on what's going on.
>
> Using redhat 7.0, 2.4.17 kernel with JFS 2.4-1.0.15-patch, used kgcc to
compile the kernel with JFS as a module. System is a dual > pentium 233 MMX
with a Promise 100TX2 ATA-100 (PDC202658 chip) card on the PCI bus. I boot
from the IDE drive attached
> to the 430HX chipset's ATA controller on the motherboard. I'm not using
the ATA-100 disks for anything but testing right now.
>
> Here's what happens: when the benchmark, bonnie++, deletes many files
from the partition, it hangs and I am unable to kill it. If I > am quick I
can halt the system and reboot. Otherwise it freezes completely (no echo on
consoles) and I'm forced to do a hardware > reset.
>
> While I recompiled with JFS debugging on, and changed /etc/syslog.conf to
see debug info in the logs I haven't seen
> anything. I've run the same test on the disks using ext2 and ext3
partitions and seen no problems. At first I was using software raid > 0.
However, even without raid, the same test on a JFS formated partition
caused the same problem. The only messages I have seen > are a waring about
an old MD ioctl:
> "md: fsck.jfs(pid 1045) used obsolete MD ioctl, upgrade your software to
use new ictls."

The utilities used to attempt to find device size by using a search
algorithm and lseek to find the end of the decvice.  In 2.4.10 and later,
we started seeing an 'attempt to access past end of device' error message
in some situations.  This was not a functional problem, but was kind of
ugly.  We changed the utilities to use ioctl's to find device size, and
upon failure or non-support, use the old search method.  It turns out that
MD does not support one of the ioctls, thus the error message.  Again, not
a functional problem, just ugly.  I changed the utilities to not use that
particular ioctl, and the change will appear in version 1.0.16.

> Please, what can I do to find out where the problem is?
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Jake

Barry Arndt
ba...@us...
IBM Linux Technology Center
JFS for Linux http://oss.software.ibm.com/jfs